Matt Mahan
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California gubernatorial candidate
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Claims by Matt Mahan (20 of 80)
Progressive governance is performative not accountable
California's progressive governance culture fails through performativeness: it launches programs, studies, and initiatives to appear responsive to every need, but spreads itself thin and loses the thing that matters most—holding itself accountable for meaningfully improving the outcomes that matter, so that it spends more and more and gets less.
Safe injection sites solve one problem, create another
Safe injection/consumption sites reduce overdose deaths and the spread of disease in the short run but may create a worse long-run problem by fostering a culture of enablement that implicitly says there is nothing wrong with people wasting their lives in addiction until they die; because the key question is the impact on others, distributing needles and paraphernalia without an intervention toward a healthier path risks massive public spillover effects.
Weather is a forcing function for shelter-building
California's mild weather removed the external forcing function that harsh-winter states faced, where people would die outdoors, which by law made those 'shelter-first' states build shelter, treatment centers, and safe indoor places; because Californians can survive outside, the state never built that capacity.
Blame politicians not nonprofits for bad incentives
There is a real phenomenon of misaligned incentives in the 'nonprofit industrial complex' where charities are not incentivized to actually solve the problems they address, but the blame lies with politicians who create the wrong incentives rather than the nonprofits or unions themselves, whose job is legitimately to advocate for their members or missions; the fix is for elected officials to make everything outcome-focused, rebidding contracts and applying performance metrics.
San Jose narrowed 40+ priorities to four
By reducing the city's focus from over 40 priorities down to just four (reducing homelessness, reducing crime, cleaning up streets, and other visible daily-life issues) and increasing accountability for outcomes, San Jose made real progress and Mahan was re-elected with 87% of the vote.
Set a goal every third grader reads at grade level
If the state set a clear goal that every third grader should be reading at grade level and aligned budget and staffing behind it—making the Department of Education and county education departments accountable for it—California would change how it operates and move much closer to that goal.
Wealth tax could cut state revenue $25B a year
An independent researcher who spoke at Stanford estimated the net impact of California's wealth tax could reduce ongoing annual state revenue by up to $25 billion, whereas it was projected at the high end to generate $100 billion, and losing the state's future growth companies could make the long-run damage far worse.
Governor's tools: pulpit, veto, budget, appointments
A California governor cannot fix everything at once but has powerful tools—the bully pulpit to spotlight problems and champion solutions, the veto to block bad ideas, the budget process to reallocate funds and staff time, and the power to appoint the people who run state agencies—and those agency heads often see their job as managing process and reducing legal risk rather than being held accountable for delivering outcomes.
Wealth tax voting-power multiplier distorts valuation
The current California wealth tax proposal contains a multiplier that values founders' shares by their voting rights, so a founder with 10x voting shares and $100 million of paper wealth would be assessed at a billion dollars and owe 5% (about $50 million), forcing them to dump shares that would then plummet in value—an incoherent design that has already triggered over a trillion dollars of capital flight.
Least Coercive, Most Life-Affirming Path Through Drug Courts
The right approach is a politics of pragmatism seeking the best outcomes with the least coercion: create shelter, services and opportunity first, then use expanding no-encampment zones, code enforcement, and policing chiefly to route people into drug courts where a judge can mandate treatment—making incarceration the goal only when someone is genuinely harming others.
No right to camp when shelter is offered
People should not be allowed to choose to camp in a public space when the city is offering a dignified, low-barrier indoor alternative; when shelter is available the city should do its best to incentivize and even require that people come indoors.
Teachers union non-interference blocks accountability
California's education problems partly stem from a highly effective teachers union whose principle of non-interference resists the state mandating how teachers teach or holding them accountable for outcomes; it took too long and too big a fight to pass the belatedly signed 'science of reading' bill establishing evidence-based phonics as the standard, and even that is not an actual mandate to use particular curriculum.
Prop 36 restored treatment-or-jail accountability
Proposition 36 passed overwhelmingly (about a 70-30 vote, in every California county) and brought balance back to drug courts after an era of over-incarceration was overcorrected into a revolving door on the streets and in ERs; it enhanced penalties for organized retail theft and created a 'treatment-mandated felony' so that on a third serious drug offense a judge can give a choice between treatment and incarceration—but the state has refused to fund it, which Mahan would fix first as governor.
California waste is mostly process, not fraud
California's inefficiency in turning tax dollars into impact is caused largely by bureaucracy, litigation, and process-heaviness rather than outright fraud; while fraud exists (e.g. potentially billions in fraudulent hospice claims and over $30 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims), by an order of magnitude the bigger driver is waste, process, and litigation in a system that can no longer execute.
CEQA lets anyone sue for almost any reason
California's Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is legendary for allowing anyone anywhere to sue over almost any reason, so investments can get caught up in courts for years and ultimately die under the cost, and the permitting/entitlement process to build zoned multi-family housing can take two years.
San Jose scaled shelter with cabins and motels
By making the singular goal bringing homeless people indoors rather than righting all of society's ills, San Jose scaled beds far faster—buying prefabricated sleeping cabins for tiny-home communities on public land and converting old motels into transitional housing—instead of spending a million dollars per door on projects that took six or seven years, and it led the state in reducing the number of people living outside.
Concern is opportunity more than wealth inequality
Mahan is more concerned about opportunity and upward mobility than about wealth inequality per se; while wealth inequality can be corrosive to democracy, declining social mobility in America is the bigger issue, and he supports progressive taxation but not a wealth tax because he doesn't think it will work in practice.
Top 1% generate 40-50% of state revenue
California has the highest or second-highest tax rate and arguably the most progressive tax structure in the country: the top 1% of income earners generate roughly 40-50% of the state's revenue in a given year and the top 3% generate over 70% of the state's revenue.
Wealth tax requires intrusive army of assessors
A wealth tax is unworkable because it taxes already-taxed, often illiquid assets and requires hiring an army of assessors to intrusively go through people's homes and value everything they own—paintings, private businesses, non-publicly-traded stock—which is complicated and expensive, and a majority of the dozen European countries that tried wealth taxes rolled them back, with a majority of those finding overall revenue declined.
Middle class will be left holding the bag
The wealth tax will not ultimately be paid by billionaires or the wealthiest because people don't believe it is a one-time tax and assume the threshold will be lowered over time into a recurring wealth tax; as wealthy company owners leave the state, it will be the middle class left holding the bag, asked to pay more to cover existing services and infrastructure.
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